Feeling environmental justice: Pedagogies of slow violence

Abstract

This paper contributes to scholarship exploring the affective politics of environmental education. Building on Nixon’s (2011) conception of slow violence, I argue that the slow violence of ecological destruction presents not only a representational challenge but also a pedagogical one: how to confront violent systems that degrade and harm particular people and places without reinscribing this damage? Drawing on qualitative research with youth-focused environmental organizations in Camden, New Jersey, I explore two very different responses to this challenge. In an effort to shield youth from the affective injuries of confronting slow violence, pedagogies of immediacy mobilize feelings of personal accomplishment through immediate action in the local environment. By contrast, pedagogies of excavation interrogate the historical and structural underpinnings of environmental injustices and channel associated affects into collective visions for more just futures. My analysis interrogates the racial, scalar, and affective politics at work in these pedagogies and considers the implications for feeling environmental (in)justice. While pedagogies of immediacy are framed as well-intentioned efforts to counter territorial stigma and generate good feelings through individual impact, I argue that such efforts ultimately reinscribe the very deficit perspectives they seek to challenge. These pedagogical differences have material implications in an inequitable and racialized funding landscape, where environmental organizations must compete for resources and may find themselves beholden to the very corporations that perpetuate ecological injuries.

Keywords:

• Environmental education
• environmental justice
• slow violence
• affect
• youth

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the participants who shared their experiences and perspectives with me. This piece benefited from feedback at the Rethinking Child and Youth Marginalities conference at Rutgers University-Camden in 2019. I am particularly grateful to Ruth Cheung Judge for encouraging me to think more deeply about the temporalities of environmental pedagogies. I also want to thank the Curriculum Inquiry reviewers and editors for their thoughtful questions and insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.